BitPay has filed suit against a Massachusetts
insurance company after losing $1.8m during a phishing attack last
December.

According to documents obtained by the Atlanta
Business Chronicle, the bitcoin payment processor was
defrauded in mid-December by an unknown individual posing as BTC
Media CEO David Bailey, whose computer was infiltrated prior to the
attack.

The attacker subsequently obtained email
credentials for BitPay
CFO Bryan Krohn, which were then used to prompt CEO Stephen Pair and
executive chairman Tony Gallippi to authorize three payments
totalling 5,000 BTC on
11th and 12th December, including one transaction from a wallet on
the bitcoin exchange Bitstamp.

Google on Wednesday vowed to charge ahead with
more encryption of user data even as law enforcement officials warn
the technology could hamper their investigations.

The tech giant's director of law enforcement and
information security, Richard Salgado, on Wednesday told the Senate
Judiciary Committee that the
security techniques are a net positive for law enforcement, because
they can many times prevent online crime in the first place. [So
what is the strategy here? Catch crooks or prevent crime in the
first place? Bob]

"There are lots of different ways to secure
data besides encryption, but there is pretty much a consensus inside
the security community that encryption is a fundamental and critical
way to protect users data from the very thieves, identity theft
cases, [and] privacy intrusions that law enforcement is interested in
investigating," Salgado told Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

… Echoing law enforcement concerns, Grassley
said officials have warned "this technology made court
authorized warrants not worth the paper that they are printed on."
However, recent
reports note that the Obama administration might be
softening its tone on the issue.

(Related) China wants the same things the FBI is
asking for. Does that make the issues clearer?

HONG KONG — The
Chinese government, which has long used its country’s vast market
as leverage over American technology companies, is now asking some of
those firms to directly pledge their commitment to contentious
policies that could require them to turn user data and intellectual
property over to the government.

The government distributed a document to some
American tech companies earlier this summer, in which it asked the
companies to promise they would not harm China’s national security
and would store Chinese user data within the country, according to
three people with knowledge of the letter who spoke on the condition
of anonymity.

The letter also asks the American companies to
ensure their products are “secure and controllable,” a
catchphrase that industry groups said could
be used to force companies to build so-called back doors — which
allow third-party access to systems — provide encryption keys or
even hand over source code.

The
Kilton Public Library will reactivate its piece of the anonymous
Internet browsing network Tor, despite law enforcement’s concerns
that the network might be used for criminal activities.

The
Lebanon Library Board of Trustees let stand its unanimous June
decision to devote some of the library’s excess bandwidth to a
node, or “relay,” for Tor, after a full room of about 50
residents and other interested members of the public expressed their
support for Lebanon’s participation in the system at a meeting
Tuesday night.

If you live in the Bay Area and have looked for
something special to spice up a birthday party, you might have
discovered the Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express, a truck that
promises to deliver an unbelievable selection of songs to your
doorstep. You might have seen a review on Yelp that said it’s
perfect for a girl’s night out or a Facebook review that mentioned
it being a crowd-pleaser at a neighborhood block party. You may have
been impressed by its 19,000 Twitter followers, and considered hiring
this mobile song-slinging truck to drive up to your next outdoor
shindig.

What you probably didn’t realize was that there
is no such thing as the Freakin’ Awesome Karaoke Express (or
F.A.K.E., for short). I made it up and paid strangers to pump up its
online footprint to make it seem real. I didn’t do it to scam
anyone or even for the LULZ. I
wanted to see firsthand how the fake reputation economy operates.
The investigation led me to an online marketplace where a good
reputation comes cheap.

Perspective. Yet another definition of
“unlimited.” Why are they still allowed to use that word? If
the network is “particularly busy” speeds are already
“throttled.”

AT&T is increasing the amount of data that
customers on “unlimited” plans can consume before their speeds
are slowed, three months after the Federal Communications Commission
proposed fining the company $100 million for allegedly not being
forthright with customers about its policies.

Under the new policy, users' data speeds will only
be slowed — or throttled — if they use more than 22 gigabytes in
a billing period and are in
an area where the network is particularly busy. The
previous threshold was five gigabytes.

Amazon
converting Prime members into Washington Post digital subscribers
with new promotion

Amazon launched a
new promotion with The Washington Post this morning, offering its
tens of millions of Amazon Prime members the opportunity to sign up
for a free digital subscription to the newspaper — converting
automatically to a discounted paid subscription after six months.

It’s the latest collaboration between the
e-commerce giant and the newspaper, which was acquired
by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos two years ago. Amazon is touting
the promotion as a benefit to Prime members, but it also promises to
be a boon for the Washington Post — giving the newspaper a deep
connection to some of Amazon’s most loyal customers.

A record of those who open their mouth before
engaging their brain. (But, will they continue to gather these
Tweets?)

In a move to preserve the public record for
everyone, Open State has uploaded its complete Politwoops archive of
deleted tweets by politicians to the Internet
Archive. The archive consists of 1,106187 deleted tweets by
10,404 politicians collected in 35 countries and parliaments over a
period of five years.

In August, Twitter
blocked Politwoops in more than 30 countries that enabled the
public to see what legislators and other elected officials, once had
tweeted but then decided to delete.

… Earlier this month, 17
rights groups including Human Rights Watch, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Access, Sunlight Foundation and others joined in
opposition to Twitter’s crackdown on Politwoops and called on the
social network to restore Politwoops’ API access.

In less than a week, the open
letter published by the group, was endorsed by 50 organizations
across five continents, including World Wide Web Foundation, European
Federation of Journalists, Derechos Digitales and EDRi.

PR
Newswire: “ScienceOpen,
the research + open access publishing network, has added article
records from more than 10 million scientific publications.
Researchers can now filter
published content by the number of citations and monitor the
relevance and impact of recent scientific results by tracking social
media mentions. Over 20,000 scholarly journals are
currently published worldwide. At this volume, researchers need a
reliable overview of trends in their discipline. ScienceOpen has
exponentially grown its database to allow scientists to more easily
navigate, search and comment on scientific articles. To enhance
discoverability, each research article page provides recommendations
for related articles regardless of publisher. This function has long
been common to consumer platforms but ScienceOpen is one of the first
to bring this feature to the research community. The new ScienceOpen
release is the next step in creating an independent, open database
which contains references and citation information for current global
research in all disciplines. The citation count of an article helps
to quantify the influence of research and those who performed it. To
support search and discovery, ScienceOpen has begun building the
first openly and freely available citation index. This was achieved
by tracking the references of the nearly 2 million Open Access
articles on the site. The new release of the ScienceOpen platform
displays the relative citation count, all the citing articles, and
their own citations. Researchers can now filter all content based on
a wide range of options including citations, journal, publisher, date
and other bibliometric data. Moreover, scientists can track in real
time the social media coverage of articles in Twitter, Google+,
Mendeley and other social networks.”

“ScienceOpen
is a freely accessible research network to share and evaluate
scientific information. We aggregate Open Access articles from a
variety of sources – opening them up to commenting and discussion.
Manuscripts submitted to ScienceOpen will be published Open Access
and evaluated in a fully transparent Post-Publication Peer Review
process.”

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.